Swords & Wizardry With Newbs - Campaign Prep

I'm starting up an online game this weekend, probably via Skype or IRC, for one semi-experienced D&D player and three complete D&D newbies. As I've mentioned before, I love introducing new people to D&D. I prefer to do it face-to-face rather than online, but at this point, I'm going with what I've got, and playing online can be a great way to game.

So, here's some of the game specifics:

Swords & Wizardry White Box - I'm using S&W White Box because it's fast, simple, and it's fairly straightforward as far as objectives go: get gold to earn XP and level up. There will be some plot stuff and interesting setting info, but above all, this is going to be a dungeon crawling game in true old-school fashion.

Four players - One player has played D&D before (but only 3.5, I think) and the other three are completely new to the game. That's part of why I chose S&W White Box; it's very simple with plenty of room for me to add new, more complex stuff later as the game goes on and the players become more familiar with the game.

Setting - I'm going to be using 4E's default setting, the Nentir Vale. I really like the "points of light in the darkness" theme, and the multiple fallen empires (Arkhosia, Bael Turath, and Nerath, at least) provide a ton of adventure fodder and interesting locations to explore. It also means that I can more easily add in dragonborn and tieflings later on, and they've already got a connection to the setting. I'll probably start them off in Fallcrest and eventually move on to either Hammerfast or Winterhaven.

I hope to make this a proper hexmap to email to my players as they explore.

Dungeon Crawls - Much as I like the roleplaying aspect, lately I've just wanted to play dungeon crawls with players/characters motivated by loot. Fortunately, that's perfect for new gamers. I can point out to them that it's a game first and foremost, and ease them into the roleplaying and plot-heavier style that I typically run. To that end, I'm going to be running a lot of simple dungeons (I've got one called Obsidian Hall that I'll post as soon as I can get a decent PDF made up) and probably a few TSR modules like B2: Keep on the Borderlands.

As soon as the game starts (our first session is on Sunday), I'll get up an actual play report written up. Until then, I'll be working on adapting some of 3.5's and 4E's more interesting (though not necessarily mechanically outstanding) classes to S&W, and I hope to get one of those posted here either Friday or Saturday.